We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering: these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love...these are what we stay alive for.
"The challenge of quantum mechanics is not in its complexity, but in its simplicity—it forces us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the universe."